


Lara Brazg's Story

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [132]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Backstory, Bigotry & Prejudice, Canon Compliant, Crimes & Criminals, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Fix-It, Forgiveness, How canon misled you, Justice, POV Female Character, Paris (City), Psi Corps, Rogue Telepaths, Sleepers, Slice of Life, Telepath culture, The Corps is Mother and Father, Worldbuilding, canon violence, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-12
Updated: 2018-08-12
Packaged: 2019-06-18 10:05:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15483345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Why did she go "rogue"?How did she get captured?And what happened to her after she was captured by the Corps?





	Lara Brazg's Story

**Author's Note:**

> The prologue of _Behind the Gloves_ is [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10153487) \- please read!
> 
> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

Canon tells us relatively little about Lara Brazg's background.

Deadly Relations, p. 44:

_Lara Brazg was thirty and had been born in Canada. She had registered with Psi Corps at the age of fourteen, a P5, and gone on the sleepers. Disappeared at twenty-one. She was implicated in two assassination attempts and one package bombing, and had kidnapped at least two teeps from reeducation facilities. A classic type A Blip, she might even be a good person who had been led astray, brainwashed by some highly organized and cynical underground._

_Her type could be shown the truth, saved, reeducated, and end up a useful member of the Corps. It had happened more than once. In her picture she looked pretty, a dirty blonde with a face smudged by light freckles._

So, like I did [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14042739) with the backstory of Susan Ivanova and her family, I take some reasonable guesses as to what may have happened to Lara Brazg, and what may have happened to her after the events described in _Deadly Relations_.

\-----

Canon contrasts Lara Brazg with another telepath fugitive, Portis Nielsson.

Deadly Relations, p. 44-45:

_Portis Nielsson was a different story. Born in the UK, he was a year younger than Brazg, but had a much longer rap sheet. Several felonies: two murders during a holdup, one count of manslaughter from a bar fight in Madrid, numerous petty and two grand theft indictments. He had spent six years in jail as a juvenile, but had never tested positive for telepathy._

_Toward the end of his stay, the prison psychologist nevertheless had become convinced that Nielsson had psi abilities, but simply did not have the mitochondrial marker - not that unusual; after all, thirty percent of telepaths lacked it. En route to a reeducation facility, Nielsson had escaped and had been at large ever since. In the past four years, his criminal activities had shifted focus to underground-related offenses. Nielsson looked like a type C Blip, a sociopath who had found an organization to validate him. While any teep could be brought around by reeducation, Nielsson's type - a born criminal, used to abusing his powers - was the toughest to change._

_His photo seemed to confirm that - even on the vid screen, his eyes 'cast malice, and his square jaw was set in an intractable smirk._

Nielsson also went to juvie at twelve, probably for something very serious because they were holding him there till his eighteenth birthday. Unlike [Joseph Begay](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15620949), he was not discovered to be a telepath. He didn't have the genetic marker, and he wasn't a P12 (or close) - he's stronger than Lara Brazg, but maybe P7 or P8. There could be any number of reasons why he wasn't discovered, probably coming down to a shitty testing protocol in the juvenile detention facility, so if kids don't have the gene, they're not watched for telepathy.

He spent the next six years in juvie, associating only with other criminal kids, not going to school or building any healthy social bonds, and his home life was probably shit. He grew up in an environment where to survive, you had to be the Badest Badass Around, and as a fairly strong telepath in a juvie full of normals, yeah, he was the Badest Badass Around. You probably don't want to mess with the guy who can sense you're about to attack him moments before you do, and can drop you with just his mind.

Then when he's seventeen, a prison psychologist figures out he's probably a telepath, and they get him Actually Tested by the Corps, and discover he is. (And the normal justice system is Overjoyed to let him become someone else's problem, and they hand him over to the Corps.)

So the Corps takes custody of him, and then see above: he attacks the people transporting him to the telepath prison, escapes, and gets himself into way more trouble, including committing three murders. He spends the next eight years unaffiliated with any telepath Underground - he's involved in normal gangs, probably doing the same thing he did in juvie: trying to rise to the top of the gang by being the Badest Badass Around.

It's not clear why he switched to a telepath gang ("the Underground"), but I think it's unlikely to be for ideological reasons (it rarely is), and it's more likely that the normals figured out what he was and wanted him dead for Any Number Of Things he did or was blamed for doing. Or being.

So he joined a telepath gang, and started rising in the ranks there instead.

\-----

Now, Lara Brazg. She came from a functional, stable family of normals. She manifested as a P5 at the age of fourteen, and her family made the choice to put her on sleepers (like I showed happen in [Kaia's story](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10207466/chapters/22653818)). It happens too frequently - parents don't know how dangerous the drugs can be (since the drug companies carefully hide all that, and the Corps either legally can't disclose it, or no one believes them when they do, one of the other, or some combination of both). And her parents, being ignorant normals, don't realize that telepathy-suppressing drugs are actually _abuse_ in their own right. They think they're doing the best thing for her, "saving" her from something or other that's worse, and they put her on the drugs.

But it is abuse.

Lara muddles through school and life, on the drugs. Her peers reject her. No boys will date her. She graduates from high school and tries to start a new life in college, but the school won't let her live on campus while on sleeper drugs (because otherwise Psi Corps personnel have to come to the dorms once a week, and that causes the college All Sorts Of Problems), so she has to take an off-campus apartment. She works various jobs to pay tuition and rent, first at a convenience store, and then at a liquor store.

She has no passion in life - the drugs make that impossible. It takes all she has to work and go to school. She has few friends, and no lovers. No one wants to get involved with _a telepath_ , even if she's "doing everything right" and trying to live as a normal. The few times she dated have ended very badly, and at least once, with violence when the guy found out what she was.

She has, more than once, thought about harming herself. Life doesn't seem worth it. Nothing does.

Then one night she's working in the liquor store, when she's twenty-one, and Portis Nielsson comes in. They get chatting, and she finds him and his accent sexy - and he flirts with her, hard. She's pretty. She's lonely.

He hangs around till her shift is over, and they spend the night together. She's never had a night like that before - or a lover like that before. Somehow, it comes out what her situation is - either she tells him or he sees it in her mind, it doesn't matter, and he asks her to run away with him. He's only got another day or so in town before he has to go to wherever it is he's going. she's miserable in her life. He tells her she can run away with him and never be on those damn drugs again, and they can be free.

She says yes. She packs light. She walks away from school, from her job, from her rent - just up and quits everything - and follows her new "bad boy" boyfriend. The drugs wear off, and for the first time since she was fourteen, she's _alive_. No more depression. No more self-loathing. No one telling her who she has to be or what she has to do, no more rules to follow.

Or so she thinks.

Portis, of course, is "up to here" in an international telepath gang (actually, interplanetary, since they also have groups on Mars). They make their money from drugs, from blackmail and extortion of normal gangs, and from highly lucrative human trafficking (of other telepaths), and then use that money to finance terrorism, kidnappings (ransom money!), and assassination attempts on normal politicians.

The leaders of the gang claim all this is "ideological" somehow, but Lara doesn't really believe it. Yeah, they can talk about Great Rogue Telepaths of bygone eras, they can talk about their dreams of an idealized future, or of a past that never was, but in the end it she knows it's all about power, and about money, and in some cases, about revenge. Everyone in their group has been hurt somehow by the normal world, and they've all decided not to give a fuck.

Even if that means political assassinations. Bombing government buildings. Trafficking other telepaths.

"Freedom don't come free" and all that shit, right?

Lara tries to quiet her conscience. The life is exciting. Portis is exciting. The lifestyle is dangerous and the sex is thrilling. She doesn't ask too many questions, and she does whatever he says - such as bringing packages and credit chips from place to place for him. She makes a good "runner," since the police don't yet know about her, so she passes undetected for a little while.

She doesn't do any killing herself, but she assists. She transports explosives and weapons. She transports money. She drives getaway vehicles. Over time, she listens to her her new "friends" and convinces herself that this is all OK, because she's only hurting the people who hurt telepaths, and so the ends justify the means. Killing powerful normals will bring peace and freedom for telepaths. Breaking comrades out of prison is part of the fight.

Yet as time goes on, she realizes this isn't the life she wants. And while she has found it exciting to think about killing normals who have wronged telepaths, all that changes when she finally sees the bloodshed for herself.

Her cell was involved in a package bombing of a government office in Vienna, targeting a normal politician who had been especially vocal about her support for the Corps. The bomb went off and killed a lot of people, mostly staff of the politician in question (who wasn't around at the time, and escaped harm). Lara watches her friends cheer at the carnage, and the extensive media coverage of the attack, and she can't share their joy. She doesn't think more death will solve anything. She thinks about the victims, and wonders if they also have families.

She's tired. She misses her own family. She dislikes life always "on the run." She even misses her boring life back at school, when no one was trying to capture or kill her, and all she had to worry about was the rent and her classwork.

Portis, also, has changed in his treatment of her. The thrill of their early romance has worn off, and now he looks at her as some sort of "asset" to the gang, and as his own personal property. He controls just about every aspect of her life - where she goes, what she does, who she can associate with. When they have sex, she feels that her body "belongs" to him, too. And when she has doubts about her life with the group, and wants out, she doesn't even have to verbalize it - he threatens her that if she ever even _thinks_ about leaving, he will kill her. She knows her thoughts are being monitored, too - by him, and by his associates - and that there's no way she could plan a getaway without being detected, if there was even somewhere to escape to.

And there isn't.

Portis, she can now see, doesn't really care about her - only about about himself and his own power. She's one more thing he can control. Now she's just an asset to the gang. And she's played that role well: she's done whatever he told her to do, and she's kept quiet about it.

She knows he wouldn't hesitate to kill her if she broke the "rules." She knows he's killed rival telepaths in the gang - and once, in Amsterdam, she stood and watched as he mugged and murdered a normal on the street. Human life meant nothing to him, only power.

When she gets pregnant, he forces her to have an abortion, in secret. "No babies," he says. How could they raise a baby with their lifestyle? They're always on the move. "We're not the fucking Dexters," she says.

When it's over, she's given up all hope for a better future. She hates herself again, this time even worse than when she was on sleepers. She wants to die. She realizes her body belongs to him and his "Underground," and will till she's dead. She has no other way out. She thought life with him would bring freedom, but it didn't - it just brought more trauma and death.

But she buries her pain and moves on, because she can't show her pain, not around their "friends."

\-----

(As adapted from Deadly Relations)

Nine years after running away with Portis, everything changes at once. By this point she and Portis have moved up a few rungs in the ladder of the Underground. They're "trusted" in the gang, and have been on the rise since the "successful" package bombing in Vienna.

First, there's a raid. She and Portis were supposed to be at a high-level Underground meeting up in Prague, but their plans had plans changed, so they weren't there.

The police crashed the party.

Three of the top guys in the Underground's European branch were captured by the Corps - Enoch, Kashiwada and D'Amico. That was already a catastrophic blow to their operations - those guys knew everything, and no doubt the Corps would scan them inside out. Portis' buddy Klassen was also there, and captured.

When Portis gets news of the raid, he explodes and starts smashing furniture in the Geneva apartment. They have to run, he says - once the cops scan Klassen, they'll know where Lara and Portis are living, and the Corps will be heading straight for them. They have hours, tops.

He spends the whole night making plans with his contacts across Europe. Lara quickly dyes and cuts her hair. Portis finally comes up with a plan to escape to Paris, to a safehouse Klassen doesn't know about. Portis and Lara travel separately, early in the morning, on different trains. Portis will leave first, with Lara about an hour behind. They plan to meet up again by a certain canal, outside the Gare de Lyon.

They get lucky - they know a train cop who sympathizes with the Underground, Alistor Hech, and he's on one of the morning trains from Geneva to Paris. They trust him to get Lara to her destination. Hech has helped them out before, misdirecting authorities, or holding them up for a few extra minutes and buying time.

Portis decides that Lara will leave from a small station - St. Gervais - so as not to attract attention. He will leave before her, from a different station, and both will travel under fake IDs. Fake identicards are difficult to acquire, and expensive (identicards have biometric data with DNA information about their holders), but they're necessary for emergencies.

Lara leaves for Paris. And she thinks everything is going according to plan until she gets there. She ends up heading for the wrong exit out of the train station, and finds the street flooded with police.

A quick surface scan of the people milling about tells her what happened: there'd been a Psi Cop at the station, and _someone had shot him dead_ , and now everyone was looking for the suspect.

She didn't know if the Psi Cop's presence had anything to do with her and Portis - if the cop had been looking for them, why had he been alone, and not with a team? - but it didn't matter, someone had shot him, and they'd now have _the entire Corps_ on their tails.

So she goes back into the station and out a different exit, the one she'd originally planned to take, and runs into a hotel to hide for a few hours - in a bathroom stall. She hopes that things will have died down by the time she emerges, and then she can either find Portis, or get to the safehouse on her own and meet up with him there.

It's not a perfect plan - she's sure the hotel security cameras have recorded her entering and exiting the building, but she doesn't have a better plan. If nothing else goes wrong, then maybe no one will ever check the footage.

A few hours passes without incident, so she leaves the hotel and heads for the canal where she and Portis planned to meet, and he's there waiting for her. He tells her to go ahead - she's being followed. Confused and alarmed, she goes ahead to the boat, and waits without getting in. A few moments later, Portis returns, holding a boy at gunpoint.

He's at most thirteen or fourteen, she figures, with a small build, and he looks terrified. He's wearing a Psi Corps school uniform, and even at a glance, he feels like a very strong telepath.

Absolutely none of it makes any sense, Lara knows. Psi Corps children of that age aren't allowed to leave school, except perhaps on accompanied outings. Children from normal families would never be wearing Psi Corps clothes. The boy seems to be alone.

"Look, Lara," Portis says, the gun pointed into the boy's cheek. "We've got ourselves a regular John Trakker here."

The Corps never used its own children as scouts, she knows. And certainly not dressed so obviously.

"Why have you been following me?" she asks the boy, then getting no answer, she turns to Portis. She wishes he'd put the gun down. "Port, he's just a boy."

"But what kind of boy?" Portis asks, and attempts to scan the boy - and Lara watches as the boy brushes off the scan seemingly effortlessly.

Well.

"I guess that answers that question," Portis says, trying not to show how much effort he'd just expended in the unsuccessful scan. "Boy's a regular prodigy. So what are you doin' followin' my good friend, Prodigy? I don't take kindly to it." He pressed the gun more tightly against the boy's face.

"I, uh, I want to join the Underground," the boy half-squeaks.

"The what?"

"You know, the Underground. I want to be a Blip."

"A Blip, huh? Funny thing about that word - the only people I've ever heard use it were cops."

"I was raised in the Corps," says the boy. "These are the only clothes I have. I ran away."

"Did you."

"Port," Lara pleads. "He's just a kid."

"He's just a kid who can turn us in," Port snarls. "He knows where we are. I don't know what kind of game he's playing, but this is no joke. When the Corps finds him, they'll turn him inside out. They'll find us. You saw what they did to Ramie and Jio, and they were just kids, too. No way."

Ramie and Jio had been two teens who lived with their group for a while. They'd been living on the streets when they developed telepathy, and had sort of decided they were brothers or something. One day they'd been careless and got caught, and everyone else had to make a run for it. Portis had told Lara the Corps had killed them both.

She knows Portis means to kill this boy, too, so he can't tell the authorities about them... willingly or otherwise.

"Can't we just leave him tied up or something?" she begs.

"He's a pup, but he's one hell of a telepath. Could even be a P12. Do you know he didn't scan you? Shit, you didn't even know he was following you! All he had to do was watch your surface thoughts and-" he caught himself. "We don't know what he knows, so he's coming with us."

Lara looks at the boy - he seems genuinely terrified. "Let's get in the boat," she says at last, and they do.

Lara doesn't think there's much chance for the boy - Portis is probably going to take him somewhere far from any possible witnesses, and leave him floating in the canal. They can't trust the kid, and they can't let him go.

"What's your name?" Lara asks the boy.

"Al."

"Al, if you really want to join the Underground, you have to let us scan you. You know that, don't you? We have to know we can trust you." Al doesn't move, or say a word. He certainly doesn't let down his mental guards. "Al," she pleads, hoping he understands what danger he's in, "if you don't, well, we can't really risk letting you go."

"No, we can't," Port grunts.

"I just wanted..." the boy begins, then stops.

"Let us scan you. Let us see what you wanted for ourselves."

The boat moves from the canal to a larger waterway. Trees line the sides, and there are crowds of people further out. Lara can feel the boy realize that Portis plans to shoot him.

"I guess I have to, huh?" he asks, even though it's not really a question.

"Yeah, Al, y'do," says Portis.

"OK then... I'm ready."

At first, it seems that the boy is telling the truth about his intentions - Lara, only a P5, sees that he's afraid of the Corps, that they've been chasing him since he ran away, and that he wants Lara and Portis' help.

 _It's OK! We'll help you!_ she thinks... and then finds herself knocked flat on her back in the small boat, a stabbing pain in her head. The kid's done something crazy - he's figured out that she and Port had a mental bond - did he know they were lovers? - and connected himself with that bond and somehow used that connection between the now three of them to scream _**HELP!**_ as loud as he could telepathically, broadcasting their exact location and how he got to that location and God knows what else that she wasn't able to catch before she found herself stunned and flat on her back.

Then he's up and climbing over the side of the boat.

Portis is swearing and firing the gun at at the boy. He's as angry as she's ever seen him. Lara feels betrayed - she was trying to help Al escape the Corps, and escape being shot by Portis, and now Portis has gone and shot the boy _anyway_. He disappears under the water, then appears at the water's edge, by the quay.

Portis fires up the motor on the boat to make chase, and turns to see the boy rising from the water - and fires again, but this time, the bullet goes right through "him" as if he was never really there, and ricochets off the rocks.

 _Shit, he's casting illusions!_ They look up to see him running along the quay, and scramble up the wet stones after him. Lara sees that the water at her feet is mixed with blood. The second shot may have missed, but the first shot had hit the boy straight in the chest.

The boy runs - first taking a right, then a left, randomly dodging down streets, trying to get away. He's getting ahead, but Lara can feel Portis confident that the boy won't get far, having been shot.

She has no idea where they're running. Is the boy leading them into a trap? Are they just going to run and run till the boy's dead, and they're lost in Paris?

They follow him down the quay, through crowds of people - some walking their dogs, others out toasting to good times in the warm Paris night. People look up at alarm at the boy stumbling and pushing past them, and with even more alarm at Portis and Lara chasing him, Portis with his weapon drawn. The boy is leaving a trail of blood.

She can feel the alarmed bystanders opening their phones to call the police.

_Just let him go! You shot him already - he'll die in the streets! We've got all these mundanes watching us! Port, stop!_

Portis ignores her.

Lara has no idea how the boy is able to keep running, even with the adrenaline. She's barely able to keep up with Portis, who in turn is barely able to keep up with boy - she knows he's mostly tracking the boy telepathically at this point, because the combination of darkness, crowds, and winding streets make it difficult to maintain line of sight. But the boy is panicking, and leaking _hard_. Any nearby telepath would be able to feel it. Normals probably would, too, she figures. The kid's exceptionally strong.

The chase him through yet another large crowd of normals - a party just getting out, or something like that - and up a street, where for a moment, they lose him. The telepathic trail's gone cold - he's probably unconscious, passed out from shock.

Portis is looking for the trail of blood in the dim light of streetlamps.

 _I can feel him,_ Portis 'casts. _I think he's out of it, but he's still alive. And look, there's a trail that goes this way. Come on._

 _Let's get out of here, Port,_ Lara pleads. _This place will be swarming with cops any moment now. That call he sent out. The mundanes we passed. They've called the police, too. He's not worth it!_

_No, you felt him get it, the safehouse. He knows where it is. He's here, somewhere. I'll finish him, He won't be any trouble._

_He's already been too much trouble! If we don't get out of here, they'll get us as well! This is taking too long!_

She's panicking, too, but inside, she feels this is the end. She'll be captured, or killed, and this will be the pathetic end to her miserable life. She pleads with Portis to leave the boy and run, but deep inside, she just wants it to be over already.

She has no hope left. She's exhausted, physically and emotionally. Their cell was captured in Prague. Even as she pleads with him, she feels cold, numb, resigned. Why are they still running? Even if they make it, it will just be another safehouse, another city, another cell.

Another squeaky cot in a dingy basement flat. Another fake ID. Another day in the same miserable life.

They follow the faint telepathic trail around a corner, into an alley, and spot the boy collapsed in a recessed doorway at the end. Lara can see blood soaking the ground where the boy is lying - he's hurt really bad.

Just a kid. Why does it always have to end this way?

She stays by the opening to the alleyway, in the light, as Portis makes his way to the boy, weapon drawn. He's going to shoot the kid _again_ , this time in the head.

He boy leans up a bit to look at them, and Lara jumps back in shock as she watches Portis fall to his knees and scream in pain, the shout echoing off the walls of the alley.

 _Damn,_ she thinks. _That kid really is a P12._

She's never met a P12 before, and she finds it a bit ironic that she's finally meeting such a kid on the last day of her life.

On the last day of all their lives.

Portis stands up again.

"Still got some left, eh, kid? Well, this ends it. Tell the Devil I said hello."

He raises the gun.

Lara hears footsteps behind her - people are heading their way, and fast. She ducks out of the way just in time as a Psi Cop and bloodhound unit swoop in, weapons drawn.

 _Hands up!_ the bloodhounds order, and she throws her hands up over her head. It's not a command of _words_ , but something much deeper, something that cuts under all conscious processing and awareness, to underlying human reflexes.

Portis spins on his heel and shoots back down the alleyway, in the direction of the police, and misses - but they don't. They open fire and kill him instantly, then rush over to the boy.

"Ambulance, now," she hears the Psi Cop say, in a rich baritone, with a crisp British accent. She doesn't get a good look at him - all she sees is the dark blur of a black trenchcoat over a Metapol uniform, and a goatee.

She's never seen a Psi Cop with a goatee.

And she's up against the wall, hands over her head, being checked for weapons. Moments later, sirens wail - normal police? The ambulance?

The flashing lights are bright, and momentarily blind her.

Portis is dead.

She has hardly a moment to process that. She's handcuffed, and watches as emergency personnel carefully lift the boy onto a stretcher, and load it into an ambulance. The boy is unconscious, but still alive. If they'd only got there a moment later... She can't think. She's in a state of emotional shock.

They lead her to a waiting police vehicle, and drive her to the closest MetaPol station.

She sits in the interrogation room, numb. She answers their questions. She consents to their scans. She doesn't care that it hurts. She doesn't care that they'll find out the location of the safehouse where she was going. She doesn't care that they'll find out more details about who was involved in the various missions the Underground sent her on. Where they make their money. Who they were planning to attack next.

She's not high enough in the Underground to know all the details, anyway. It's all vague and hazy, like her life.

She lies on the cot in the jail cell, and just wants everything to finally end.

\-----

As I explained at length [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15620949), the Corps is aiming not just for punishment, but also for _reconciliation_ with all telepath transgressors. While I'm not saying everyone in the Corps always lives up to the values of the Corps (this never happens in any organization or society), their whole cultural model of punishment is fundamentally different than what many normals are accustomed to.

Punishment is harsh, and forgiveness is complete.

Now, of course there are exceptions. Cadre Prime adopted a system where punishments were extreme even from a very young age, and increasingly random until children graduated to the Minor Academy in an abusive shaming ritual. (See [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12665913) and [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12680634).) Sandoval Bey is forced to accept that this is the reality for Cadre Primers, because Director Vacit himself set this up, and set it up long before Bey joined the Corps, when he himself was a small child.

Bey, himself a later, does however become one of the most loved and respected leaders in the whole Corps (telepaths born and raised in the Corps defer to his judgment, and gladly). He is very personable, and they respect him both as colleague and for embodying the ideals of the Corps even better than they themselves often do.

Vacit was a strange character who few knew (and even those closest to him didn't know all his secrets) - people respected his authority, but they never really knew and loved him _as a person_ , with the exception of probably Natasha Alexander.

Bey, however, they all loved _as a person_ , not just as a competent teacher, administrator, and Psi Cop - and his philosophy of justice modeled the same social bonds he forged with others. That's one of the reasons Vacit entrusted Bey with looking after Bester when he was gone.

Deadly Relations, p. 88:

"You love the Corps, but that isn't enough. You must love those _in_ the Corps, and they must love you. You must love the Blips you hunt. You must love the world you live in, Mr. Bester."

In his youth, Bester loves the Corps as an abstract ideal, but mostly dislikes the people in it, or at least feels distant from them. And because the book is written from his perspective, we have a limited view of how social ties _usually_ work in the Corps.

And again, _usually_ , the same philosophy applies to telepaths who have run away or committed crimes and who are being reintegrated into society: "Whatever you've done, we're a family, and we still love you."

So Lara would be brought to a facility for "Type A Blips." She would receive intense counseling to process not just her nine years with the Underground, but all the years before that on sleepers, and her feelings towards her family for making that choice for her. The central issue is that since she developed telepathy, there's been no one in her life who has loved her for her, for who she _really_ is rather than what they want her to be (her parents), or how useful she can be to them (the Underground). This would take a while, and they wouldn't let her out so soon.

But in the end of the day, they wouldn't just drop her back on the street with no money, no place to live, and no job. On the contrary - she'd come out with a job, an apartment, and crucially, a network of others who she's met in the camp, who serve as her new support system (as she is part of theirs).

"Reeducation" of Type A Blips is not "we force you to believe what we want you to believe." It is, as Bester was trying to say as he sees her picture, "showing her the truth" about the Corps.

But very ironically, that is a "truth" that Bester himself at that age really does _not_ understand - it's not just "the Underground is bad, and the Corps is good." It's not about loyalty to some abstraction (while individual humans can never be trusted), as Bester lives his life. It's about the very tangible relationships between telepaths _as a family_ , the very same kinds of connections he pushes away. That's what "saves" people from a life of crime, or from self-destruction - not abstractions, no matter how "perfect".

I'm giving you the ideal. Sometimes reintegration programs don't work. Sometimes kids raised in the Corps have emotional problems, too. I just need to refute this whole "THEY TORTURE YOU INTO BELIEVING THEIR IDEOLOGY!" nonsense.

**Author's Note:**

> As an addendum, it should be noted that once Johnston came to power (2202 or so, a year before the events described here), he slowly changed the Corps’ approach to rogue telepaths, from “family members who have gone astray” to “the enemy of the Corps.” From the beginning, he sought to create division in the Corps, and replace loyalty to the Corps and its _values_ with loyalty to him personally. There was substantial resistance from telepaths, but over time, he got his way - by 2256, he had transformed even the Corps’ flagship school in Geneva such that small children were taught that rogue telepaths were the “enemy.” Reeducation camps were transformed more and more into prison camps. Divisions were fostered, and by the time of the Telepath War, the telepath population was violently divided (a conflict which was encouraged and supported by powerful mundanes… for example, Garibaldi funded the whole war). Although the presentation of the “reformed prisoner” in Season 5 is still ridiculous, the camps were harsher, and methods were used which would have been outrageous in earlier eras. The influence of Johnston and his successor had taken its toll in the Corps, and corroded telepath values and community bonds. What telepaths did to each other during the war itself was _brutal_.


End file.
